page_title: Alexey Stakhanov
section_title: Record disputed
hierarchical_section_title: Alexey Stakhanov / Record disputed
caption_attribution_description: English: The caption: Alexey Stakhanov, the initiator of Stakhanovite movement. The student of Industrial Academy.
context_page_description: Aleksey Grigoryevich Stakhanov was a Russian Soviet miner, Hero of Socialist Labor, and a member of the CPSU. He became a celebrity in 1935 as part of what became known as the Stakhanovite movement – a campaign intended to increase worker productivity and to demonstrate the superiority of the socialist economic system.
context_section_description: The validity of Stakhanov's record has been called into question. In 1985, The New York Times printed a story alleging that though Stakhanov had indeed succeeded in his feat, it was only because the Communist Party had arranged the event as a way of boosting public morale, with many other miners working to help Stakhanov beat the mining record.
  The Times quoted the chief of the Tsentralnaya-Irmino mine branch of the Party, Konstantin G. Petrov, as saying that "I suppose Stakhanov need not have been the first... It could have been anybody else. In the final analysis it was not the individual face-worker who determined whether the attempt to break the record would succeed, but the new system of coal extraction."
  In 1988, the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda claimed that the widely cited achievements of Stakhanov were puffery. The paper insisted that Stakhanov had used a number of helpers on support works, while the throughput was tallied for him alone. Still, according to the newspaper, Stakhanov's approach had eventually led to increased productivity by means of a better work organization, including specialization and task sequencing.
  It has also been claimed that his record was beaten by Alija Sirotanović of Yugoslavia and Sergej Scemuk of Ukraine.
caption: Alexey Stakhanov, the student of Industrial Academy on the front page of Pravda issue 314 (7280) dated Nov 15 1937
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